By Ike Okonta
The three leading aspirants for the All Progressives Congress’ (APC) presidential ticket, Bola Tinubu, Dave Umahi and Yemi Osibanjo, lavishly praised President Muhammadu Buhari during their declaration speeches and in fact promised to continue from where he had stopped. They said Buhari was an uncommon patriot and achiever and that they considered it a privilege to be stepping into his giant shoes.
Some might say this is the usual politics and that these presidential contenders did not really mean what they said; that they were merely positioning themselves to harvest the northern posts that President Buhari is likely to bequeath to his successor. Even so, words matter, and praising Buhari when in fact what he richly deserves right now is sharp criticism, is an indication that leading politicians on the APC platform do not in fact see anything wrong in the former’s performance these past seven years.
If Tinubu, indeed, brought you to power, is it the punishment for that we see in what is about to happen to his ambition?
It needs to be reiterated: President Buhari has been an unmitigated disaster as President. He anchored his presidency on three key performance indicators: to revive the economy; tackle insecurity; and slay the monster of corruption. As I write, the national economy has virtually collapsed. The dollar is exchanging for nearly 600 Naira, a 100 percent hike from when Buhari took office in May 2015. Food inflation has hit the roof and going to the market for simple purchases has become an exercise in agony for the ordinary Nigerian. The much talked-about industrialization and diversification of the economy have not occurred.
Two weeks ago, bandits waylaid an Abuja-Kaduna train, slaughtered nine passengers and carted many more into the nearby forest as hostages. Before that, these same bandits had laid siege on Kaduna airport and killed and maimed fellow Nigerians. But Kaduna is merely the poster-boy for a wider malaise. The entire nation is gripped by insecurity, and kidnappers, bandits, armed robbers and secessionists are having a field day, killing without let. President Buhari does not have a security policy. The Federal Government had not analyzed this ailment and explained to anxious Nigerians the root causes and what it intends to do to curb it. What it has been doing these past seven years is merely to throw the Nigerian Army at the problem – as if militarizing it is the answer to a problem which clearly has more complex and deeply-rooted economic and social dimensions.
President Buhari’s anti-corruption strategy – that is if the government has a strategy – is similar to its response to insecurity. It has been throwing the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission at the problem, hoping that it would eventually go away. But the EFCC is under-resourced in a country of 200 million where looting the treasury at the local government, state and federal levels is seen as a matter of course; a ‘reward’ for holding public office. I have not seen a policy paper from the government that has intelligently articulated the corruption problem, its root causes, and how it can be creatively and robustly tackled. Like every other major problem confronting the Buhari government, corruption has been confronted in a reactive manner, and brawn and rhetoric have taken the place of clear thinking, creativity and an ability to see it as a malaise with deep historical roots.
All these lead me to conclude that President Buhari has been tested and been found grossly wanting. To put it in stark terms, the Buhari presidency these past seven years has been a debacle and the challenge as we inch towards 2023 is to make sure that this debacle is not repeated by electing another walking disaster like Muhammadu Buhari. The question must be asked: How did Buhari happen to us? Simple – Bola Tinubu, in 2014, saw him as the possessor of 14 million northern votes and he reasoned that if he could convince the Yoruba to join the Buhari ticket, the All Progressives Congress would displace Goodluck Jonathan and romp home to victory.
Notice that Buhari’s capabilities and antecedents did not enter the equation. Had this been so, the fact that Buhari’s first outing as military Head of State between December 1983 and August 1985, was a disaster would have been put on the table and effort made to find a more suitable northern candidate who would not only have delivered the northern votes but also performed creditably as President. But Tinubu was in a great hurry to displace President Goodluck Jonathan. Painstakingly examining the credentials of the candidate he was backing to do the supplanting did not come in, and in May 2015 Nigerians were gifted a walking disaster.
The Nigerian Left is not presenting a candidate for the forthcoming presidential election, which means that the incompetent and corrupt class that has been running our affairs since October 1960 will have the field wide open to it – be it the PDP or the APC. This class, whether in Army uniform or civilian garb has been tested again and again and all it has been able to deliver has been corruption, massive unemployment and widespread poverty. Even so, as Nigerians prepare to troop out to the polling stations in 2023, they should at least insist on one thing- that there be a series of debates aired live on national television between the various presidential candidates. I do not think the candidates presently on offer will be able to come up with visionary and pro-people policies, but at least Nigerians will choose who among them is able to intelligently articulate his policy proposals.
The tragedy of Nigeria’s democratic journey since May 1999 has been that the ordinary people have played the role of unconcerned bystanders, watching helplessly as the politicians make a mess of things. The time has come for NGOs, community-based organisations, the trade unions and civil society at large to begin to take an interest in politics, forcefully articulate policies and programmes they want implemented, and insist that whoever wants their votes should adopt these policies. This is politics from the ground up, politics that insist that policies matter.
President Buhari has been a disaster. Nigeria cannot survive another president like him.
*Dr Okonta was until recently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Politics, University Of Oxford. He presently lives in Abuja.
